“SAP has made it even clearer than ever that HANA is its ticket forward, unveiling a version of its core Business Suite for the in-memory platform,” business and technology site GigaOM wrote Friday. “The point … is to marry online transaction processing with analytics, with the primary benefit being speed.”

Business Suite on HANA may very well be the only product on the market to feature real-time analytical business applications on one in-memory platform, as IT news site ZDNet noted Thursday. The target demographic includes customers looking to scrutinize social media, oversee orders or just sift through torrents of Big Data.

“This is the biggest announcement since the launch of R/3 nearly 20 years ago,” SAP co-founder and Chairman Hasso Plattner told CNBC Thursday, referencing the company’s iconic enterprise resource planning software. “There are new customers that are so large … we couldn’t run them without HANA.”

This is the latest step in getting all of SAP’s products to run on SAP HANA, the company’s flagship data warehouse appliance, which processes heretofore unimaginable volumes of data. But the business operations and applications integrator Business Suite will continue to run on other databases as well.

“We’re also going forward, in a non-disruptive mode, for the other databases,” Plattner said. “So the customer has a choice.”